421 early-career researchers across Europe obtained a highly competitive 2026 ERC starting grant. Six of them are UGent researchers, reaffirming the university’s strong position in European research. Hilde Gunnink (BantUGent) is one of the UGent grantees for her LoLaSa project, i.e., “The lost languages of Southern Africa: Linguistic traces of Southern Africa’s early inhabitants“.
More info: https://www.ugent.be/plone_portal/en/news-events/six-erc-starting-grants-2026
Abstract
Southern Africa has one of the longest histories of human habitation in the world. For thousands of years, this region was likely a hotbed of linguistic, genetic, and cultural diversity. But over the past two millennia, this diversity was largely wiped out during successive migrations of farming populations speaking Bantu languages, followed by European colonization. These major demographic events led to massive language loss, obscuring Southern Africa’s deep history and eliminating its intangible cultural
heritage.
In this project, we will apply a new linguistic approach to recover relics of the lost languages of Southern Africa, through the traces
they left in the Bantu languages that replaced them. We employ tried and tested methods from historical and contact linguistics,
combined with cutting-edge advances into detecting contact influence from unknown donor languages. We will tailor this approach
to the unique configuration of the Southern African linguistic landscape, which is exceptionally suited to unearthing the traces of now
vanished languages.
This approach will allow us to identify linguistic features in present-day Bantu languages that were adopted through contact with pre-
Bantu languages, known and unknown. We will use these linguistic data to reconstruct aspects of the cultures, subsistence strategies
and history of Southern Africans. These findings will then be interpreted in a multidisciplinary framework, engaging with previous
research in genetics, archaeology, rock art and history. In this way, we will uncover aspects of the lives and languages of indigenous
Southern African communities who disappeared long ago, but whose legacy lives on in the Bantu languages that now dominate the
region, shedding light on a linguistically largely unstudied, but historically crucial facet of Southern Africa’s past.